Anita Sethi was born in Manchester, UK where her love of nature first flourished in childhood, in wild urban spaces.
Her acclaimed first book, I BELONG HERE: A JOURNEY ALONG THE BACKBONE OF BRITAIN has been described as "a magnificent and redemptive achievement" by The Bookseller, "a memoir of rare power" by the Guardian, and "an amazing odyssey: inspiring, powerful, encouraging and incredibly brave" by the Independent. The Sunday Times review wrote: "punchier and more political than most nature writing, this book is a thing of beauty". I BELONG HERE won a Books Are My Bag Award, was nominated for the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing, RSL Ondaatje Prize, Great Outdoors Award and Sethi is also recipient of an RSL Literature Matters Award.
She has also contributed nature writing, essays and short stories to the anthologies THE WILD ISLES edited by Patrick Barkham, WOMEN ON NATURE edited by Katharine Norbury, SEASONS, COMMON PEOPLE, SEASIDE SPECIAL: POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE, WE MARK YOUR MEMORY, and SOLSTICE SHORTS among others.
She has written for national newspapers and magazines including The Guardian and Observer, Sunday Times, BBC Wildlife, Vogue, New Statesman, Granta, and Times Literary Supplement among others, and appeared on various BBC radio programmes including Open Book, Front Row and Today, BBC 5 Live and Sky. She has been shortlisted for Northern Writer of the Year at the Northern Soul Awards and Journalist of the Year at the Asian Media Awards, and judged the British Book Awards, Costas and Society of Author Awards. She has lived around the world including being International Writer in Residence for the Emerging Writers Festival in Melbourne. Her career highlights include going birdwatching with Margaret Atwood in the UK’s oldest nature reserve.
www.anitasethi.com
www.twitter.com/anitasethi
Praise for I BELONG HERE:
“I Belong Here is a brilliant, brave and important book, which tells the story of two intertwining journeys: one made on foot and the other made in the heart. Anita’s is a vital and resonant voice and here she powerfully and movingly reclaims the landscape of the North as hers to love and belong in.”
– Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland
“An incredibly powerful, moving and beautifully told story of what it means to belong, of trauma and healing, slavery and freedom. Anita Sethi’s journey and her words are brave, psychologically astute and eye-opening, with fascinating insights and a rare attention to the sensuous details of wild magic, the layers of outer and inner landscape, and the potency of language. This book will make the world a better place. We are so lucky that Sethi invites us to walk on the path alongside her, seeing the majesty of the natural world through her eyes, and her prose, inciting us to fall in love with it, again."
- Lucy Jones, author of Losing Eden
“A magnificent and redemptive achievement. I find it so moving that such a beautifully written, hate-defying book has been born from such a horrific experience. A powerful blend of memoir, current affairs, travel and nature writing...just like the limestone strata of the Pennine sedimentary landscapes she so evocatively describes, I Belong Here is a work of many layers. The book beautifully expresses her love of the natural world, and her joy at putting one foot in front of the other. I Belong Here is a shining example of how books, at their best, can be an act of resistance and a communal force for good.”
- Caroline Sanderson, The Bookseller
‘In gorgeous prose that rolls along like the uplands, Anita Sethi opens our eyes to the beauty of our countryside and the hurt and healing found therein. It is rare to find writing that evokes landscape so finely but also conveys our inner world with such power, emotion, vulnerability and truth.‘
– Patrick Barkham, author of Wild Child
“Excellent...powerful...A brilliant writer.”
– Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant.
“By turns joyous and humbling, I Belong Here is an urgent and necessary addition to the canon of contemporary writing about place in Britain.”
– Katharine Norbury, editor of Women on Nature
"Bold, lyrical and compelling, Sethi redefines the nature genre with this brave, brilliant and defiant book. Part memoir, part philosophy, part analysis of current British culture and politics, I Belong Here is a reminder to us all to speak out when we witness racism of any kind. It is a rousing and beautiful ode to hope and wildness. I loved it."
- Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Adults and Animals
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